


Numb

by RhinoHill



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-11 03:02:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18421476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RhinoHill/pseuds/RhinoHill
Summary: "I should have done the proper thing, thanked him and walked him out. But numbness cuts a swathe through bullshit.When all but the most searing emotions feel unreal, nothing but honesty survives."The missing final scene of "Threads", S8-Ep18.---oOo---





	Numb

**Author's Note:**

> Four days ago, I received a phone call. A patient, who had become a good friend, had beed attacked by dogs while on a walk with his family. They were all badly injured. His brother is still fighting for his life.
> 
> Since the call, I've walked outside my body. The world has had the volume turned down. Grief does this to me.
> 
> Writing Sam through the numbness of her father's death helped me begin to feel again. This is the first time I've dared to voice Sam in first person, because her numbness is so personal.
> 
> If anyone reading this is wading through the darkness of grief, I hope this brings you a candle flame of understanding.
> 
> xo
> 
> \---oOo---

They say that when you die, the soul leaves the body.  
But when my father let out his last breath, mine was the soul that left. As his hand slackened in my grip, his eyes caught at a thread in me and pulled it with him. As he left, a part of me unravelled.

The infirmary was too bright, yet suddenly not bright at all. A blanket had dropped, heavy, on my shoulders and through it everyone seemed distant; everything surreal. I stood and watched myself as I let go of his hand and switched the cardiac arrest alarms to silent.

Around me, people walked; filing in charts, removing tubes, asking me questions. 

“Coffee, Sam?” Janet’s question snapped me back into my body only long enough to shake my head. Then I floated away again. Into the quiet world of pastels where I could see my body going through the motions, but where I didn’t live.

His arms around me were the only sensation I could feel through the velvet fog of unreality. Quiet. Sure. Always. In the bustle of the after-death of a man who used to be alive, Jack held me.

“Let me drive you home.”

His words penetrated the cold around me. I watched myself shaking my head against his chest. I was numb. The rough scrape of his uniform against my cheek was the only thing I could feel. I was fine. I felt nothing. I could get myself upstairs and to my car without feeling. Being numb was unexpected, but it was useful.

“Please.”

His whispered plea hooked through the dulling curtain. For a moment, emptiness flooded me and made me reel, but he wouldn’t let me fall.

“Okay,” I heard myself whispering.

Being a passenger on the route I drove home from work every day shook me. I found myself reaching out for indicator levers when we approached a turn, not knowing where my hands should go. Everything was brighter, but also dimmed. I watched a film reel of myself.

It was a plane tree’s turning leaves that punched through the silence in my head. Violent autumn colours bleeding silently.

“I feel as if I should let my brother know.” I murmured the thought in a trance. “But he lost my father three years ago.”

He said nothing, but his hand reached out and wrapped around my fingers. Warm. Steady. In silence, he drove me home while my breath and my tears steamed up his passenger window.

He walked behind me up my drive, waiting close enough to me to radiate warmth onto my back as I fumbled with the lock on my front door. Once it caught, he reached around me and opened the door, then folded his hand around mine again.

“Come.” His hand on mine was his only touch, but his eyes traced the tear tracks on my cheeks before he turned and pulled me inside.

Next to my bed, he toed off his shoes.

I stood, nerveless as a toddler, frozen in the numb unfeeling that was born in my father’s dying breath. I knew that he would die. But as loudly as my mind screamed it was okay, my body stood beside it in a freezing silent fog, unravelling.

His hand tugged me towards the bed, onto the bed, nestled me into the circle of his arms. The only warmth in an unreal, silent world. Feeling his heart beating against me, sleep took me.

I woke to emptiness, in my chest and in my bed. The bathroom door was closed and through the window, night was falling. I pushed groggily off the bed. I wanted him to come back and hold me again, melt some of the numbness away with the heat of his body, the strength of his embrace. But I couldn’t ask. I padded to the guest bathroom down the hall. Even the cold water splashed on my face and neck was soft and distant, touching someone else, cooling down their red-rimmed eyes rather than mine. 

I heard him in the kitchen before I noticed the light spilling through the open doorway. Rubbing my neck, pulling curtains closed against the darkening sky, my body stepped into every room in my house before I returned to him. 

The softness in his eyes caught a thread that snagged around my knees, making me lean heavily against the kitchen island. 

“Coffee?” His head nodded towards the boiling kettle. 

“Tea?”

His brows furrowed. “I’ve only seen you drinking coffee at work.”

I lifted a shoulder. “It’s easier to have the same as everyone else.”

“Aah. I’ll have to learn how you take your tea then.” 

Standing next to my body, viewing the scene, I saw his jaw tighten as he registered his own words, the question they built of futures filled with homes and tea. 

If I had any emotion to give him, i would have poured it all at his feet. As it was, the only thing I had to offer was my own confession in return. I spoke to his bent back as he looked into the fridge for milk. “Your beers are on the top shelf, if you’d like one.”

For a moment, he stilled. I could sense him taking in the unbroken six pack of the brand of beer he always drank next to the half-finished pack of the pilsners I preferred. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded before breaking the cardboard collar on the pack. 

Silence drew around us as he stirred my tea and set it down next to me, popped the lid off his beer and leaned against the counter opposite me, caressing the lip of the bottle with his finger between sips. Eventually, he set the bottle down. 

“Mind if I rummage in the fridge and make us something to eat?” His words were asking about food, but his eyes voiced a different question. 

I sighed. I so wished I could step back into my body and feel the warmth of his care. 

“Sir, you don’t have to do this. I’ll be okay alone.”

In two strides he closed the space between us and wrapped my fingers in his hand. My eyes tugged towards his touch. 

“Carter, I know you’ll be okay alone. But you don’t have to be.” His breath was close enough to warm the skin of my throat. “I’m here. And I’ll stay for as long as you need me.”

I should have done the proper thing, thanked him and walked him out. But numbness cuts a path through bullshit.  
When all but the most searing emotions feel unreal, nothing but honesty survives.

A small, embarrassed laugh twisted out of my chest. 

“As long as I need you?” I asked. I looked up from his thumb on my knuckles and straight into brown eyes I never wanted to let go of again. “Do you have someone to water your plants?”

“Oh, Sam.” His lips brushed mine. His arms wrapped me in belonging.

I breathed him in, tasted him on my tongue, and finally, the thrumming numbness folded itself into a box and crept into the space beneath my heart. Still there, but no longer all consuming. My fingers snagged the unraveling threads of me and tangled into the short hair at the base of his neck, weaving us together in a pattern only the future could know.


End file.
